A Conversation with Liliana Porter and José Luis Blondet

As part of the November 15-18 PINTA Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Fair, artist Liliana Porter will speak about her long artistic career with José Luis Blondet, curator for special initiatives at the Los Angeles County Museum.

Liliana Porter works across mediums in printmaking, as well as on canvas, photography, video, installations, and public art projects. In 1965 she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop along with artists Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. She was a professor at Queens College, City University of New York between 1991 and 2007. Her work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship award in 1980; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1985, 1996, 1999), the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994), and PSC-CUNY research awards (1994 to 2004). Porter’s works have been shown nationally and internationally and most recently featured in The Incongruous Image – Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter at the New Museum; 6 VentoSul - Bienal de Curitiba; Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design; as well as in shows in Bogota, São Paulo, New York, Chicago, Houston, Boston, Madrid, Paris, Lisbon, and Lima. The artist’s works are represented in many public and private collections such as TATE Modern Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, The Museum of Fine Art Boston, Museo del Barrio, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Daros Collection Zurich, amongst many others. She is currently working on a publication of dialogues with Ines Katzenstein, which will be part of a series of ten artist books produced by the Cisneros Foundation.

Jose Luis Blondet is the curator for special initiatives at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Prior to moving to Los Angeles in 2010, Blondet was the curator at the Boston Center for the Arts, where he organized exhibitions and projects with artists such as Liliana Porter, Vasco Araujo, Helen Mirra, and Andrew Witkin, among others. From 2003 to 2007, Blondet worked at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, where he developed education and public programs for Dia: Beacon. In 2010, he co-organized with Gabriela Rangel the exhibition Marta Minujin: Minucodes at Americas Society. At LACMA, he has presented performance art projects by Cindy Bernard, Fallen Fruit, Guy de Cointet, among others. In 2011, he co-organized the exhibition MARIA NORDMAN: FILMROOM SMOKE, 1967- PRESENT, as part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative.

Since 2005, Blondet has performed in Joan Jonas’s The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, commissioned by Dia and subsequently presented at In Transit Performance Festival (Berlin, 2008), Staatstheater Stuttgart (2009), Sao Paolo Biennial (2009) and the University of Texas (2012). He has written articles and essays on art and literature that have been published in Madrid, Mexico, Costa Rica, Caracas, and New York. He is the author of two books: MBA, Obra Reciente (Caracas, 2000) and Sastre (Caracas, 2001), a collection of poetry.

In Caracas, Venezuela, Blondet was the director of education of the Museum of Fine Arts, and adjunct professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela until 2001. In 2003, he completed his degree in curatorial studies at Bard College, New York, thanks to a fellowship from the Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.